Authors: James A. Levine
Tags: #Literary, #Political, #Fiction, #Coming of Age
The Blue Notebook (28 page)
The queen raced to the audience chamber and threw open the door. The prince was not there. There was simply a pool of water in the middle of the floor. The queen ran from the chamber to the palace gates, which she had never left in all her life. When she reached the gate, hardly able to breathe, the guard bowed, for he had never seen his queen up close and certainly never barefoot, dressed in a simple cotton robe. The queen could not catch her breath. “Where is the prince?” she gasped. The guard answered, “He rode from here a few minutes ago … you can still hear the horse hooves”. In the deep silence of the night he was right, but the sound was disappearing.
The queen ran back to the audience room and threw herself over the little pool of water. She desperately tried to drink the water, licking it from the floor like a thirsty nomad when he finds water in the desert. Tears filled her eyes as the prince’s love touched her lips and was swallowed inside of her. A veil of anger will lift, but love is forever blinding.
The queen ran to the palace stables. The stable boy lay asleep as usual in the loft. He could not believe it when he saw the queen before him. One of the royal horses was already saddled and she leaped upon the horse and galloped at full speed through the open palace gates as the guard watched, astounded. Everyone knew the queen had never left the palace in her whole life.
The queen rode in the direction from which she had heard the hoof sounds. She rode all through the night but never saw the Prince of Princes or heard the echo of his horse. She was in despair.
As the sun rose, her horse was tiring and slowed. She brought it to a gentle walk. She had never seen her kingdom before; she had never seen the fields that every year filled the grain stores or the houses that her people lived in, and she had never seen children playing in the early morning sun. All of a sudden a glistening caught her eye. In the distance she saw another pool of her prince’s love melted onto the grass. She drove her horse at full gallop to the lake. When she reached it she saw a lake of her prince’s love stretched before her as far as her eye could see. Remember, the queen had never seen a natural lake before, since she had never left her palace. She leaped from the horse and ran into the pool of love.
The queen had not only never seen a lake before but had never been taught to swim. And so, the Queen of Queens drowned. She did not cry out because she understood that this was how it felt to be consumed by love.
The only creature on earth that saw what happened next was the royal horse, who was unable to tell a soul. As the Queen of Queens disappeared beneath the water, out from the water walked a white leopard. It was a beautiful, lean, muscular creature with a coat that glistened so that you could see the stars and the moon reflected in the sheen of her fur. The leopard had eyes of silver, for it carried the soul of the Queen of all Queens.
The leopard then ran with a gentle stride across the borders of Kumara into the eastern lands. She ran through rains and snows, across the plains of Abyssinia, and into the mountains of the Himalaya. The leopard climbed along long-forgotten passes and across rock faces that no one even knew existed.
After many moons she chanced upon a cave. There, within it, seated in lotus pose, was the Prince of Princes. He was naked and alone. The leopard looked upon the Prince of Princes through her eyes of silver.
Through him she saw heaven and earth melt into one beautiful river of love. In his eyes, the circles of love spun over earth, connecting a crying child to a beggar laughing, connecting a thrust of hope to a cry of despair, resolving evil with the good. Everything else is illusion. The silver-eyed leopard then sat at the feet of the Prince of Princes for eternity.
Writing my story has exhausted me. I concentrate in my flickering consciousness to look over the hat vendor’s shoulder and see his face. I cannot, but I am near.
The following is the text from a piece
of paper folded in half and inserted
into the blue notebook
Handwritten in pencil.
A Hat’s Tale
Everything is foretold,
Yet in all we have choice.
Our good deeds sit upon a scale:
Tilt it this way and the sun rises,
Tilt it that and all that remains of the flame is a
spiral of smoke.
Everything is given
,
Yet upon us all floats a veil.
The vendor happily extends you credit.
But, as you borrow, he shall write it down.
Every night the collector makes his rounds
And takes from you asleep precisely what is his.
For your debt is inscribed
And your judgment, truth.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by James Andrew Levine, MD, PhD
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levine, James.
The blue notebook / James Levine.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53049-1
1. Teenage girls—India—Fiction. 2. Teenage prostitution—Fiction.
3. Indentured servants—Fiction. 4. Diaries—Authorship—Fiction.
5. India—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.E92386B58 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008035259
v3.0
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 - Numbered sheets of paper from the Royal Imperial Hotel, Mumbai